


META: Star Wars Sequel Predictions

by rexluscus



Series: Rex's Star Wars Meta [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 10:25:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: Essays I wrote beforeThe Last Jediwas released that speculate on how theStar Warssequel trilogy will play out.





	1. What has Luke been doing all this time? Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some of these ideas got squashed by TLJ, but some of them were kind of right! Anyway, I think they're cute.
> 
> This meta was originally posted on Tumblr, but I'm posting it here to make sure it's preserved.

**Jedi philosophies of the dark side and light side**

We know Luke has been off learning about the ancient Jedi to inform his creation of a new Jedi Order, and I’ll bet in the process he has revised his notion of what the dark and light sides of the Force actually  _are_. After all, Yoda and Obi-Wan both told him Anakin was lost to the dark side forever and Luke would have to destroy him. That  _must_ have prompted Luke to rethink the Jedi position on the dark side.

And maybe what he does is re-conceive them in more value-neutral terms. George Lucas always called the light side “selfless” (thus good) and the dark side “selfish” (thus evil), but you  _could_ think of dark versus light simply as active versus passive, willful versus receptive. (In certain Legends materials, they’re framed as [Power](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Font_of_Power) versus [Knowledge](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Pool_of_Knowledge), I think.) There’s casting your will  _outward_ to reshape reality, and then there’s letting reality  _inward_  to shape  _you_ , letting the Force tell you what  _it_  knows. So maybe the light side simply shows you things as they are, and the dark side helps you change them. To be consumed by the dark side would thus be to become pure will and to stop listening, stop trusting the Force’s wisdom. By the same token, you could also be  _too light_ —you could become complacent and passive when active intervention is more appropriate.

Seen in these terms, the Jedi ambivalence toward emotion makes more sense. I always wondered how a kid like Luke was supposed to make sense of the contradiction between Obi-Wan saying “stretch out with your feelings” in ANH and “bury your feelings deep down” in ROTJ. But it kinda makes sense if you figure that emotions are light when they give you information, “feeling” in the sense of perceiving, but dark when they are desires or “passions” you are compelled to satisfy. What is a desire? Just an impulse to reject things as they currently are and make them into something else. If you consistently ignore reality in favor of your desires, that’s when the dark side takes over.

I dunno if I’m sold on this idea. But I  _am_ pretty sure the sequel trilogy is going to reframe the role of emotionsin the Force. I’ll get into that in chapter three.

**Rejecting the dark-side taboo**

Back to Luke. When Luke had to face Vader in ROTJ, the selfless/selfish distinction didn’t help him distinguish the right path from the wrong. Was it selfish or selfless to try to save his father? Selfish, in a way, if you figure Luke prioritized the soul of one man with a personal connection to him over the rest of the galaxy. Yoda and Obi-Wan both got it wrong too when they told Luke to ignore his feelings and destroy Vader. Their mistake hinged on believing nobody could turn back to the light side once they’d fallen to the dark side—a premature passivity, you might say. They accepted something they didn’t have to accept. They were misled by a taboo: a notion of the dark side as an evil contamination that can’t be reversed. And this made them complacent.

So here’s my prediction: when Luke started his new Jedi Order, he resolved not to make that mistake again. His experience with Vader showed him that this whole dark side/light side business needed to be rethought. And he concluded that this very taboo against the dark side gave the dark side too much power and limited the light’s.  _The taboo itself_  made the Jedi passive, made them believe they were more helpless than they were.

So Luke decided to  _explore_  the dark side rather than shun it. Maybe the dark and light sides were just natural principles of action and reception, he reasoned, and maybe the wisest Force-user could use  _both_  sides in balance: they could exert their will but also listen; they could exercise power tempered by wisdom. This was Luke’s vision for a new kind of Jedi.

Then shit went wrong.


	2. When Ben Solo fell, Luke gave him a push

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A theory of how Ben fell.

In the last chapter, I speculated that while Luke has been out roaming the galaxy doing mysterious Jedi shit, he’s been re-conceiving the dark and light sides of the Force. And his impetus for this was his Jedi mentors’ failure to recognize that Darth Vader  _was_ in fact capable of turning back to the light. Their mistake, he thought, was to treat the dark side as taboo, as an evil stain that contaminates what it touches and not as a natural component of the Force that can be understood and even used in moderation.

But when little Ben Solo comes to Luke, he has already been shaped by the dark-side taboo: Han and Leia have sent him to Luke because they’re afraid of his potential for darkness. (In TFA, when Han says “There was too much Vader in him,” Leia says, “That’s why I wanted him to train with Luke.”). Luke, of course, knows exactly what to do: he’ll teach Ben that the dark side isn’t something to be feared and avoided but confronted and studied. And Ben will be okay, because Luke will guide him.

What Luke doesn’t know is that Snoke is guiding Ben too. (In the TFA novelization, Leia says Snoke had been watching and manipulating Ben since “the beginning,” whatever that means.) So the whole time Luke and Ben are learning about the dark side, those lessons are acquiring a different spin via Snoke. Luke is unwittingly giving Ben just enough rope to hang himself with.

Thus, when Ben falls completely under Snoke’s influence, Luke has good reason to feel guilty: he wasn’t just responsible for Ben, he  _actively exposed him to the dark side_. His big plan to deprive the dark side of its taboo power and train his new Jedi to balance the dark and light sides backfired horribly. That’s as good a reason to become a hermit as any.

Luke’s direct contribution to Ben’s fall might also explain why Luke went looking for the first Jedi temple. He believed he’d gained genuinely new insight into the nature of the Force, but after Ben’s fall, he wonders if he was just  _wrong_. So he looks for answers in the Jedi Order’s origins. Maybe the first Jedi understood better how the dark and light sides should co-exist.

**So who is Snoke?**

Snoke’s canonical attitude toward the dark and light sides has a passing resemblance to the attitude I’m ascribing to Luke, by the way. At the very least, we know he encourages  _Kylo_  to draw on both dark- and light-side traditions. (And, interestingly, Kylo now subscribes to a “light-side taboo” that wouldn’t have made sense to anyone in the original trilogy.)

My prediction is that Luke developed his dark side/light side ideas  _with_  Snoke. Maybe Snoke fashioned himself as a Force sage outside the Jedi mainstream, not bound by its orthodoxies, excluded from the fight against the Empire because he didn’t subscribe to Jedi doctrines about the light and dark sides. Presumably Luke wasn’t satisfied with Jedi orthodoxies since they told him to kill his father. Maybe Snoke presented himself to Luke as someone with answers to these conceptual difficulties.

If Snoke was there with Luke, posing as an ally, then when Leia sent Ben to Luke, she unwittingly sent him right into the arms of the seducer. 

Maybe Snoke’s particular strength was concealing his emotions and intentions from other Force-users, which allowed him to wait like a snake in the grass for Ben to come to Luke. (If mental manipulation was Snoke’s special province, that could explain where Kylo learned his skill with the mind-probe.)

Is there any evidence Snoke was Luke’s friend? Naturally, they’ve been vague about who Snoke is, or was, but here’s a passage from the TFA novelization that provides  _some_  ambiguous data:

> Han drew back slightly. “Snoke?” 
> 
> She nodded. “He knew our child would be strong with the Force. That he was born with equal potential for good or evil.”
> 
> “You knew this from the beginning? Why didn’t you tell me?”
> 
> She sighed. “Many reasons. I was hoping that I was wrong, that it wasn’t true. I hoped I could sway him, turn him away from the dark side, without having to involve you.” A small smile appeared. “You had— you have— wonderful qualities, Han, but patience and understanding were never among them. I was afraid that your reactions would only drive him farther to the dark side. I thought I could shield him from Snoke’s influence and you from what was happening.” Her voice dropped. “It’s clear now that I was wrong. Whether your involvement would have made a difference, we’ll never know.”
> 
> He had trouble believing what he was hearing. “So Snoke was watching our son.”
> 
> “Always,” she told him. “From the shadows, in the beginning, even before I realized what was happening, he was manipulating everything, pulling our son toward the dark side.”

This is all very vague…but it  _sounds_ like Leia knew Snoke existed, and knew he was a threat to Ben, since Ben was a child. What else could “from the beginning” mean? But Snoke’s “influence” needn’t have been direct; “manipulating everything, pulling our son toward the dark side” could just mean manipulating circumstances, not communicating with Ben directly. “From the shadows” is fantastically vague. He could have been light-years away or their next-door neighbor. And nothing Leia says implies that she knew who Snoke  _was_ at the time. Maybe she just sensed  _somebody_ messing with her kid and only learned who he was later, after Ben’s fall. Her remark about hoping she was wrong suggests that her awareness of the danger was intuitive and indefinite, and she wasn’t in a position to take direct action (like, say, moving away from Snoke physically).

Here’s my theory: Snoke started out close to Luke, but somehow nudged Ben toward the dark side from a distance, with the goal of making Leia worry enough that she’d send Ben off to her Jedi brother for help. Once Ben came to Luke, Snoke had direct access to him and things progressed from there.

In other words, Snoke manipulated the situation so that Leia would send Ben  _into_ danger thinking she was sending him  _away_ from it. That’s consistent with the idea I’ve been developing, that the  _real_ path to the dark side is fear  _of_ the dark side and a refusal to confront and understand it.

One way or the other, this fear of the dark side  _has_ to be central to Leia’s relationship with Ben, as I’ll explain in the next chapter.


	3. Leia, Ben, and the Dark-Side Taboo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How Leia unwittingly contributed to Ben's fall.

I’ve explained how I think Snoke might have manipulated Ben into falling. But he needed something to work with. A big factor in Ben’s fall could end up being the contrary messages he got from Leia and Luke about the dark side. It seems likely, based on  _Bloodline,_ that Ben’s fall will have happened right after the news about Darth Vader being Princess Leia’s father hit the galaxy. So here Ben is, listening to Luke tell him how the dark and light sides of the Force aren’t really good and evil,  _per se_ , and then he learns his mother concealed some major dark-side stuff in their family history from him. What’s he supposed to think?

Look at this description in  _Life Debt: Aftermath_ of the first time Leia senses baby Ben through the Force:

> Her hands fly in front of her mouth as she both laughs and cries at the same time. This, she thinks, is the light side that Luke always goes on about— the promise of light, the promise of a new life…
> 
> And then, the black edging of the dark side encircles her bliss like a noose. Because what rides swift on the heels of hope but fear— a fear that stretches out far and wide like a growing shadow. Fear of having a child in an unstable galaxy. Fear of whether or not Han is alive— or Luke, too. Will the child grow up with a father? An uncle? A mentor? What is her legacy and what will her boy’s legacy be?
> 
> Her breath catches in her chest. She has to force herself to breathe.
> 
> _Clear your mind. Clear it all. Focus, Leia. Focus._
> 
> Are those her thoughts?
> 
> Or are they Luke’s?

One wonders what that felt like to baby Ben. Joy, then fear, then nothing, deliberate emptiness. What if the experience that stuck with Ben wasn’t feeling his mother’s fear, but feeling her  _suppress_ it?

We don’t know if Ben was aware of Leia’s attempts to shield him from the dark side, but it doesn’t sound like they ever sat down and had an honest conversation about it. In the novelization, Han gets mad at Leia for never telling him Ben was in danger, so it seems like Leia tried to keep Ben  _away_ from the dark side rather than helping him (or the rest of their family) copewith it. Once shielding him was no longer possible, she sent him to Luke.

So maybe Ben puts it together that the fear he’s always sensed from her is related to the dark side—it’s a fear that  _he_  might be dark. That’s why she sent him away. Her rejection of the dark side is actually a rejection of  _him_ , he now reasons—not fear  _for_ him, but fear  _of_ him. And all because of this basic misunderstanding about the Force, this refusal to see the dark side for what it is, to see its value. He puts his interpretation of his parents’ behavior together with an amalgam of Luke’s and Snoke’s ideas and comes to the brokenhearted conclusion that his family hates what he is, and so it’s his responsibility, as Vader’s only true heir, to reject his sentimental ties to his parents and embrace his dark-side power.

**Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate**

How will this mess be resolved? Well, here’s another prediction: Finn and Rey will fix it, because they are going to change how we understand the role of emotion in the Force.

Yoda insisted that fear and anger lead to the dark side. But right off the bat in TFA, Rey’s and Finn’s storylines work to redeem these two emotions. Finn’s fear of battle is actually the stirring of a moral consciousness. Rey’s anger allows her to access her power, not in a dark-side-y way so much as a “why yes, I  _should_ be angry!” way. Anger, after all, can signal our awareness of injustice, and it needn’t lead to hate the way Yoda seems to think it must. Fear and anger make Finn and Rey  _aware_  of evil and give them the strength to oppose it; neither leads to the dark side in TFA. Arguably, the dark side tempts Rey near the end of her duel with Kylo as she strikes him down in anger… but it appears to be  _fear,_ fear of turning into someone like Kylo, that stays her hand and prevents her anger from becoming hatred. So, you might say that TFA is about the  _positive_ uses of two emotions understood in earlier films to be purely negative.

Finn and Rey also demonstrate the positive value of attachment. The prequel trilogy posits Anakin’s love (for his mother, for Padme) as the weakness Palpatine uses to turn him to the dark side. In ESB, Vader uses Luke’s love for Han and Leia to manipulate him. But in TFA, Finn’s love for Rey motivates him to overcome his fear and join the Resistance. Finn and Rey are bothmotivated by love for each other to fight Kylo at the end. And most importantly, it appears as if Snoke manipulated Ben Solo not, as Palpatine did with Anakin, by playing on his attachments, but by making him  _reject_ those attachments.

If Leia’s big parenting mistake was shielding Ben from bad feelings, this is why that matters. The sequels are going to argue that the Jedi rejection of passionate emotions, particularly negative ones like fear and anger, is itselfthe whole problem.


	4. What has Luke been doing all this time? Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke and Snoke's ultimate goals.

In the last chapter, I explained how I think Leia’s  _fear_  of the dark side will have contributed to Ben’s  _fall_  to the dark side. But there’s another factor to consider: Leia’s political career. Cuz Ben’s commitment to the First Order (unlike Vader’s to the Empire, arguably) is actually ideological.

(I’m making it sound like Ben’s fall was  _all Leia’s fault._ So, let’s hope either that a) I’m wrong, or b) the writers found a way out of the trap our culture always falls into of blaming mothers for everything.)

**Why Ben hates republics**

The dark and light sides, when reframed as will versus receptivity, align roughly with the two major political philosophies in the new trilogy: [Centrism](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FCentrists&t=ZTlkN2Q1Y2ZkMmVkMDNiMTBjNTY1MjZjNjVhOTBlZjJmMGRkNWMzOCxneEdHNnM0Qg%3D%3D&b=t%3AU9TkIGThBz70dX9eHZhhSw&p=http%3A%2F%2Frex-luscus.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F154709089372%2Fwhat-has-luke-been-doing-all-this-time-part-2&m=0) and [Populism](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FPopulists&t=MGZhNWE1OGI2M2JlNWQ3NmZjZThhYmVkZjc5Y2U4NDBkNDIwYzNlYixneEdHNnM0Qg%3D%3D&b=t%3AU9TkIGThBz70dX9eHZhhSw&p=http%3A%2F%2Frex-luscus.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F154709089372%2Fwhat-has-luke-been-doing-all-this-time-part-2&m=0), which in  _Bloodline_ are framed as a kind of [Federalism](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFederalism_in_the_United_States&t=Yzg0Yzg1MzhmNDNhMzIyMWVkZWJmNzJlOWU1ZGIzOGRlMjUzN2EwZCxneEdHNnM0Qg%3D%3D&b=t%3AU9TkIGThBz70dX9eHZhhSw&p=http%3A%2F%2Frex-luscus.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F154709089372%2Fwhat-has-luke-been-doing-all-this-time-part-2&m=0) and [Anti-Federalism](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAnti-Federalism&t=YjFmZTExMDFiNGFjY2YyNzZlOTBhZDdhMTQwZWIwYjM2ODkyYzAyNSxneEdHNnM0Qg%3D%3D&b=t%3AU9TkIGThBz70dX9eHZhhSw&p=http%3A%2F%2Frex-luscus.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F154709089372%2Fwhat-has-luke-been-doing-all-this-time-part-2&m=0), until the First Order reveals  _its_  Centrism as just straight-up authoritarianism, opposed to a republic and to democratic principles. Centrism, you could say, is dark—just a small party of people imposing their wills on everyone else; whereas Populism is light—listening to others and letting everyone kinda do their thing.

According to Luke’s re-conceived Force philosophy as I’m imagining it, a just society would need a balance of light and dark: too much dark leads to pitiless authoritarian regimes and too much light leads to complacency and the toleration of evil. But Ben probably understood these alignments simply as a condemnation of democratic republicanism, since he has watched his mother suffer fools in the New Republic his whole life. Leia would say you can have democracy and individual liberty without complacency, but maybe Ben values the order produced by a single governing will more than the freedom they’d be sacrificing. Maybe after a lifetime of watching his mother struggle (which deprived himof her company and [almost got her killed](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Napkin_Bombing)), he prefers the too-much-dark-side scenario to the too-much-light-side one. Liberty and democracy are just dumb people wanting to do whatever they please instead of what’s best. If the will of a wise and powerful Force-user could straighten out the chaos of the broken New Republic, why  _wouldn’t_  you do that?

**Democratizing the Force**

Here’s my other prediction: Luke’s reframing of the dark and light sides of the Force isn’t his  _only_  new idea. Luke has in fact discovered that  _everyone_  has the Force, to some degree. Any knack or intuition, from Finn’s impulse to reject the First Order’s violence to Poe’s flying talent and what Han just calls “luck”—all of that is the Force too. So Luke’s new Jedi Order was going to be for everybody. Luke wants to democratize the Force, wants to teach even people who weren’t born with a strong sensitivity to it how to use it.

Snoke knows this, since he was there, and  _that_ is why he fears Luke so much and why he’s so anxious to prevent the Resistance from finding him. I mean, what could be worse for an authoritarian regime? If people all over the galaxy gain access to the Force, the First Order is fucked.

This might also explain why canon has been so cagey about Luke’s other apprentices. Maybe Luke didn’t  _have_ any other apprentices besides Ben, because he was busy coming up with a way to train literally everybody _._ (The Jedi temples might somehow be involved in this. When Ben turned, we know he destroyed Luke’s  _temple_ , but we have no direct evidence he killed any  _people_.)

And maybe, if Luke’s goal is to democratize the Force, Snoke’s ultimate goal is to restrict it. Maybe his goal is to eradicate Force-sensitivity entirely, or in everyone but himself. Kylo doesn’t know this yet; Kylo thinks they’re going to rule the galaxy together. But maybe Snoke’s plan relies on one Force-user in whom the dark and light sides co-exist. Especially in the novelization, Snoke makes a big deal of how important this quality of Kylo’s is to him. Maybe he’s going to make Kylo the battleground on which the dark and light sides will effectively destroy each other, or somehow render themselves inaccessible to sentient beings. Once that happens, Kylo himself will either be destroyed or lose his power. Either way, he’s not in Snoke’s long-term plans. As far as Snoke is concerned, the First Order will be led by propagandists and bureaucrats like Hux, not by Force-users like Kylo, whose strong wills would only interfere with the execution of Snoke’s. There’s only one will that’ll guide the new empire, and it’s not Kylo’s. Of course, Snoke encouraged Kylo’s Vader-worship, but that was a red herring to keep Kylo from suspecting his true intentions.


	5. Finn, Rey, and “Force people”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Finn both have the Force.

I speculated in the last chapter that the sequel trilogy will ultimately make the Force available to anyone and not just the chosen few. If it does that, then of course it needs  _two_  heroes: one who is gifted in the more traditional Skywalker way, and another whose gifts seem (at least initially) on a more ordinary-human scale. Rey’s Force gifts are like Luke’s: immediately strong and presumably innate. Finn is just clever, intuitive, brave, and conscientious. But intuition and conscience  _could_ just be other words for the Force. I’ll bet the endgame is that Finn has the Force too and will learn to use it.

(Basically I’m imagining Force-sensitivity on a spectrum, not as an absolute you-have-it-or-you-don’t value. So, if it’s a scale of 1 to 10 and Rey is a 10, then Finn is in the 5-6 range and most of us are at 2-3.)

**“Force people” versus “everyone else”**

Leia’s other big parenting mistake, which she cops to, was excluding Han from her concerns about Ben and the dark side. In other words, she took it for granted that the Force is for some people and not others. (In her defense, Han has never wanted anything to do with the Force, like, aggressively.) But I’ll bet you fifty bucks that that shot of Han shooting a stormtrooper without looking turns out to be evidence that he has the Force, in some small way.  _Anyone_ unusually skilled at something does. Which means anyone can cultivate their sensitivity to the Force once they’re aware of it.

The original trilogy implies that Force-sensitivity is innate. Or maybe it’s that the Force chooses certain people. But the result is the same: “The Force is strong in my family,” Luke says. The prequels explore the consequences of this idea in the quasi-aristocratic orders of the Jedi and the Sith. If you’ve either “got it” or you don’t, then Force-use can be kept exclusive to a powerful priestly class. The prequels clearly present this attitude as dangerous: the Jedi were just as bad as the Sith with their Chosen One shit. That turned out really badly! So I think the sequels are going to dismantle this ideology of exclusiveness. And Finn will play a major role in that. 

Look at that moment on Jakku when Finn’s buddy dies and he realizes he can’t participate in the First Order’s violence anymore. He has an epiphany (which, as I pointed out in chapter three, he experiences as fear) and the Force seems to be involved. But it’s subtle: the Force just acts as a source of insight, the way it could for anyone who bothers listening for it. Like, the Force can move large objects around, but it’s also a metaphor for something we have in the real world: intuition and conscience, being aware of the world around you and your obligations within it.

If the sequels dismantle this idea that some people are “Force people” are others aren’t, it’s doubly important that Han in TFA basically says “I was wrong, the Force is real, it’s a real thing, take it seriously!” That’s the sequels taking the most Force-indifferent hero from the original trilogy and saying “the Force is relevant to him too.” But it took him a long time to recognize that. Maybe too long.

Here’s another prediction: I think Leia’s intuition that Han would be able to reach Ben will end up being true. “Strike me down,” Obi-Wan says, “and I’ll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” I bet you a hundred bucks Han becomes more powerful than  _he_ could possibly imagine—whether by managing full Force-ghost-hood or simply by persisting in Kylo’s memory as someone who loved him unconditionally. But I’ve gone on at length elsewhere why I think Kylo will eventually turn back to the light.


	6. My Snoke Theory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snoke as a parody of the Jedi.

So I explained in chapter one why I think Snoke started out as someone close to Luke. I said he may have presented himself as a Jedi outside the mainstream, which appealed to Luke because Luke’s goal was not just to re-found but to  _reform_  the Jedi Order that had told him his father was irredeemable. **  
**

Let me go farther. I’ll bet you ten bucks Snoke didn’t just present himself as a Jedi. I’ll bet you he _is_  a Jedi.

A Dark Jedi, then? I mean, maybe. I know that’s a thing. But I don’t think he is. I think he’s just a regular Jedi.

We never see Snoke use the dark side of the Force, that we know of. Only Kylo ever uses the Force on-screen. So maybe Snoke  _isn’t_ a dark-side user. He doesn’t use passionate, negative emotion to feed his power because he doesn’t  _have_  any passionate emotion. That’s why he needs Kylo.

Snoke is just a calculating psychopath who turns  _other_ Force-users to the dark side and manipulates them into serving him.

Other than his emphasis on strength, power and coercive order, Snoke  _sounds_  a lot like a Jedi. He values discipline and self-control. He considers “sentiment” a source of error. When he talks about Vader “succumbing to emotion” in the TFA novelization, he could almost be Yoda talking about the “seductive” power of the dark side. Snoke (and Kylo when he’s parroting Snoke’s teachings) just sounds like a Jedi who has replaced “dark side” with “light side” and “anger/fear/hatred” with “sentiment” in his rhetoric. 

The obvious explanation for this is that Snoke is _just an evil Jedi_.

**Bizarro World Jedi**

In the original trilogy, Yoda characterizes the dark side as easy and seductive compared to the light side. The “path” to the dark side is fear, anger, and hate; you start down that path by “giving in” to those emotions, by letting them control you. The Jedi, on the other hand, are all about discipline and detachment. The dark side feeds on passion.

In TFA, however, Kylo Ren is very concerned with discipline. That discipline might frequently fail, but that only shows he values it. He’s practically robotic except for the two times he blows his stack, which he clearly does as a way to release pressure and not to  _accomplish_ anything. A true dark-side user would  _use_ his anger. Kylo has to vent his.

He also talks about the  _light_  side as “seductive,” which wouldn’t make sense if he didn’t think of the dark side in terms of self-control. And nowhere that I can recall, in the film or the novelization, do he and Snoke ever mention passion as a source of his strength. They talk about “the power of the dark side” a lot, but not what it takes to access that power. There’s none of the Emperor’s rhetoric about “giving in to your hatred” etc. Snoke in fact cites Vader’s “succumbing to emotion” as his fatal mistake, a mistake Kylo is determined not to repeat.

At one point, the novelization has Kylo thinking this: “A great deal of his education had been devoted to learning how to live and move forward in the absence of emotion. Right now, he needed every bit of that training to stay calm.” And here’s the thing: it’s hard to tell if the “education” he has in mind is Luke’s training or Snoke’s. It could be either. Or it could be a misinterpretation of either. Kylo Ren seems to obey a doctrine that isn’t  _opposed_  to the Jedi’s, but is rather a twisted  _parody_  of the Jedi’s. 

The only major difference is Kylo’s and Snoke’s emphasis on strength and weakness. Emotion is bad because it  _weakens_  you. The Jedi may teach that passion or emotion is dangerous, but they also teach that feelings are useful: Obi-Wan says to Luke, “stretch out with your feelings!” When a feeling is an urge or a compulsion, it’s dangerous. When it’s giving you insight into what’s happening around you, it’s vital. What’s hard is telling the difference. Kylo Ren rejects  _all_  emotion, all feeling, even the useful kind.

He does seem to have an ability to “reach out” that parodies the kind of thing Obi-Wan wanted Luke to do. Kylo doesn’t reach out to listen or to feel, though, he reaches out to take. His rejection of emotion is a rejection of his receptive capacity. He will be unmoved by anything except his own will. The Jedi seek to be unmoved but not unaffected; they try to hear everything their feelings are telling them without letting those feelings rule them. Kylo Ren seems to have taken the Jedi injunction against letting oneself be ruled by emotion and twisted it: he tries to purge himself of  _all_  emotion. That, of course, doesn’t work, but he attributes the failure to his own weakness, not to the futility of the goal.

I think that was Snoke’s plan all along. Snoke has fed him Jedi philosophy in its worst, most toxic form and allowed Kylo to blame himself for its failure.

And you can see how Kylo might have been fooled. In ROTJ, Obi-Wan more or less orders Luke to kill Darth Vader. Luke, famously, replies, “I can’t kill my own  _father_.” And Obi-Wan replies, “Then the Emperor has already won.” Obi-Wan’s point is: to do what is right, we must make personal sacrifices; we must set aside our own selfish feelings. So from a certain angle, Kylo’s actions when he kills Han look almost heroic. They’re certainly consonant with one interpretation of the Jedi code. If the cause is good (and we don’t yet know what Kylo’s cause  _is_ , remember) then a Jedi must be willing to sacrifice anything to it. Remember when Yoda told Luke to sacrifice Han and Leia?

**The dark side radicalized**

So with Kylo, Snoke has basically poured the dark side into a Jedi bottle and shaken it up. He  _knows_ Kylo will explode. Cuz as long as Kylo thinks he’s a failure, he’ll stay reliant on and subservient to Snoke, and Snoke will be able to control him.

When TFA came out, the filmmakers were talking about how their bad guys were different from the original trilogy’s. “They’re full of emotion,” they said, referring to Kylo and Hux. And it’s true. Both Kylo  _and_ Hux are passionate true-believers. 

I think the movies are trying to say something about powerful men who believe in nothing manipulating passionate believers into keeping them powerful. They  _need_ these passionate underlings to stay in power, but they themselves believe in nothing but their own power.

This is the shit you see everywhere now: unhappy young people getting radicalized by wannabe tyrants who use their followers’ passionate belief to control them and build their own power-base. It’s the dynamic the far-right movements in Europe and the States have in common with radical Islamic terrorism. 

That’s what Snoke represents.

About a year ago, I read a news story about a young ISIS operative who was ordered to execute his mother, more or less as a loyalty test. Because that’s how you manipulate people you’ve radicalized: you cut them off from their old social bonds. You get them to destroy any form of emotional support they have other than the organization they now serve.

If that’s the position Kylo is in, then his way out isn’t to  _defeat_ Snoke. It’s to recognize that  _Snoke_ needs  _him_ to stay powerful _._ Their relationship is predicated on Kylo’s belief that  _he_ needs  _Snoke,_ but it’s a lie, and I’ll bet Kylo eventually figures that out.


End file.
